That MIT paper

Thu Aug 12 11:35:36 UTC 2004

David,

* dga at lcs.mit.edu (David G. Andersen) [Thu 12 Aug 2004, 02:55 CEST]:
> Global impact is greatest when the resulting load changes are
> concentrated in one place.  The most clear example of that is changes
> that impact the root servers.  When a 1% increase in total traffic
> is instead spread among hundreds of thousands of different, relatively
> unloaded DNS servers, the impact on any one DNS server is minimal.
> And since we're talking about a protocol that variously occupies less than
> 3% of all Internet traffic, the packet count / byte count impact is
> negligible (unless it's concentrated, as happens at root and
> gtld servers).

This doesn't make sense to me.  You're saying here that a 1% increase in
average traffic is a 1% average increase in traffic.  What's your point?

if a load change is concentrated in one place how can the impact be
global?

How can a 1% load increase in one specific place have anything but
minimal impact?

At root and gTLD servers I assume DNS traffic occupies significantly
more than 3% of all traffic there.  Still, a 1% increase remains 1%.

	-- Niels.